The Myth of the Working PoorSteven Malanga: City Journal

The War on Poverty

• Michael Harrington, The Other America (1962):• Millions of Americans are stuck in hopeless

poverty that only massive government intervention can help.

• Since 1962, all levels of government have spent about $10 trillion on poverty programs, with disappointing, even counterproductive results.

The Myth of the Working PoorSteven Malanga: City Journal

The New War on Poverty

• Today, a new generation of journalists is straining to duplicate Harrington’s feat of igniting a new War on Poverty.

• The new generation brushes aside the failures of the war on poverty and the successes of so many in climbing out of poverty by themselves.

The Myth of the Working PoorSteven Malanga: City Journal

The Effects of the Welfare Reform Act

• Since welfare reform has passed, employment among single mothers who had never previously worked has risen 40 percent.

• Child poverty in single-mother households fell to its lowest point ever in just three years after welfare reform became law.

The Myth of the Working PoorSteven Malanga: City Journal

The Effects of the Welfare Reform Act

• NY Times: “Lawmakers of both parties describe the 1996 law as a success that moved millions of people from welfare to work and cut the welfare rolls by 60 percent.”

• The Welfare Reform Act reduces government benefits and thereby forces people to get a job and work for a living.

The Myth of the Working PoorSteven Malanga: City Journal

Barbara Ehrenreich: Nickel and Dimed

• How were “the roughly four million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform…going to make it on $6 to $7 an hour?”

• Ehrenreich works as a waitress, a maid, and a sales associate in Wal-Mart, and cannot earn enough in these jobs to support herself, much less any dependent children she might have had with her.

The Myth of the Working PoorSteven Malanga: City Journal

Barbara Ehrenreich: Nickel and Dimed

• Ehrenreich ignores the fact that 80%-90% of persons with entry level jobs move up quickly to better paying jobs.

• Even though about 13 million persons legally and illegally immigrated into the U.S. in the 1990’s, poverty rates declined because most persons rose out of the lowest income categories.

The Myth of the Working PoorSteven Malanga: City Journal

Barbara Ehrenreich: Nickel and Dimed

• Ehrenreich paints the low-wage workplace as oppressive and humiliating to workers.

• She is “oppressed by the mandatory gentility” that the compacy requires of her, as if being nice to customers and co-workers were part of the tyranny of capitalism.

The Myth of the Working PoorSteven Malanga: City Journal

Barbara Ehrenreich: Nickel and Dimed

• When her outrage is not shared by her co-workers, Ehrenreich assumes that they accept their terrible exploitation because they have become psychologically incapable of resisting.

• Ehrenreich claims that the upper and middle classes should feel ashamed of our dependency upon the underpaid labor of others.

The Myth of the Working PoorSteven Malanga: City Journal

The Myths

• Mostly, it is bad choices and bad attitudes that keep people in poverty, not the quality or structure of the U.S. economy.

• What is really missing from the lives of many who cannot escape poverty are the types of values and traditions that stigmatize the behaviors that keep them in poverty.